Michael Hatton (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am happy to endorse the Aviation Transport Security Amendment Bill 2006. Minor changes have been made in terms of Australia’s aviation transport security—the first steps, as indicated by Minister Truss, in responding to Wheeler’s report. But those first steps are relatively minor. There were 17 major recommendations in the report. Here we have two. What do they affect? Special events. What is the core of the action taken in relation to special events? The action is to say that, where you have a security controlled airport, effectively the level of security you need can be variable. This bill allows for that variability based on events, whether they are large or small. The bill allows you to have a much lesser security level imposed given the nature of a particular event, so that you do not have the same expectation throughout all of the operations of the airport.

You would have to wonder how significant this bill actually is as a response to the problems at Sydney airport and others. I would say, firstly, in my estimation it is extremely minor. It is a welcome step, sure, but minor. Secondly, in relation to air cargo and air cargo screening, a series of changes have been made here, and they are important. Why? Because we still do not have a full regime to ensure that, where cargo goes by air in passenger aircraft, there is full screening of that cargo. Currently only 80 per cent is screened. Are you happy to fly it when you know that 20 per cent of the cargo is not screened at all? People who own the aircraft and people who are flying on those aircraft should—given that the world has changed and given that the member for Blair’s speech was fundamentally about hindsight and about trawling back to when we were last in government—realise that things are different.

Whenever any party is in government, it is material to ask about what they did in relation to the challenges and responses that faced them. It may surprise the government to know that they have been in power for 10 whole years—an entire decade; one-tenth of a century. They should be responsible and they should take responsibility for what happens on their watch. Will the government do it? The answer to that, fundamentally, is no. Try and find a minister who will take responsibility for what really happens within their purview and within their effective control. It has not happened since 1998. Try to find a member of the government who will stand up and say, ‘There really still are fundamental problems in the area of aviation security.’

This bill is only minor in taking two small recommendations from Wheeler. Does it really get down to the core of what Wheeler identified? I grant that John Anderson, who was then minister for transport, asked Wheeler—an international expert in relation to not only airport security but also the related matters of policing and terrorist effect—to conduct this review. I am glad that he did it. The results of that review are very important. But the key recommendations in the report are not in this bill, and they should be. If the government has laboured since September 2005 to bring forward this product, it should be an elephant and not a mouse. What we have is a mouse. The core recommendation that Wheeler made is that there should be one policing force responsible for aviation security within Australian airports. Is that in this bill? The answer is no.

We know that Wheeler identified problems with Customs and what Customs powers are in relation to the airport. We know that there are problems with the operation of the Australian Federal Police at airports—that there are not enough AFP officers and that there is a combined presence of the AFP, the Australian Protective Service and private security companies, which I will come back to. I have spoken about this before, but it represents a fundamental problem with security clearances, an aspect specifically dealt with in this bill and in the amendment.  There is also an interface with state policing organisations. What did Wheeler say specifically about this? He said that he wanted more extensive intelligence sharing and recommended ‘a permanent police presence at 11 major airports under a single airport police commander at a staffing level based on threat and risk assessment’.

However, this government does not take seriously the charge that is put on it by the Australian community—the charge to take charge of what it should be in charge of. When this government took office, it declared, through the National Commission of Audit—which it designed and presented—that the Commonwealth government should not take responsibility for a single element of service delivery in Australia. The goal of this government, expressed 10 years ago in a yellow covered document of about 160 pages, was that the Commonwealth should merely audit and benchmark. It should be a spectator sitting on the sidelines. Where is the model for that? Question time. Where is the real action, according to the way this government sees it? The action is in the press gallery or it is in the public galleries, with people looking on, watching and saying, ‘They should be doing better, shouldn’t they? or, ‘There should be a bit more action in relation to this.’ This government will not take responsibility for what is in its charge and it will not really move to do what it needs to do to aggressively fix the problem of aviation security in Australia.

The member for Brisbane outlined a series of arguments in relation to the sorts of things that should be happening and argued for those in regard to our amendments. But the underpinning factor here is that the government has paid money to someone insightful, Wheeler, to do a report. He has come in, had a look at the situation and said effectively, ‘This is a mess’—and it has been a mess for a long time. It does not matter who is in government. We were in government previously and this government has been in government for a decade. If it is a mess, fix it. If you do not fix it, every Australian travelling through Sydney airport is at peril, for a range of different reasons. But most of the peril does not come from those coming into and passing through airports. From a series of revelations that have been made over the past six to 12 months and from those that have occurred before then, we know that part of the peril comes from there being no effective control over what happens on the other side of the fence—that security clearances are not right.

I have argued previously, both in the Main Committee and in this House, that this government needs to look carefully at exactly what is happening with those security clearances that are being given. What are the key problem areas that are not addressed in the changes that have been made here? The key problem areas are in the embedded groups of people who have been there for a long time. Go to Sydney airport and talk to security staff who work there. I have done that, so I know them personally. When they were Qantas security staff, I was involved in helping them in trying to keep their jobs, before airport security was taken over by a private security company and they were thrown out.

We now have a scaled reaction in terms of security, which is one of the fundamental problems. Airport security has been outsourced because we do not have an Australian government with the gumption of the American government. The American government takes responsibility for aviation security at its airports. It employs federal government employees to be responsible for aviation security—not only to undertake all of its aspects but also to be directly responsible to the elected representative who is in charge who, in the end, is responsible and has to report to the President and his cabinet. They take it from the very ground.

What does the government here do? Not only does it allow the situation where we do not have a single police force under a single commander so that one particular element can take control of and have responsibility and regard for the whole situation; it also allows the situation where a security company can take up the head lease and say, ‘Yes, we will provide security on this airport,’ and then sublet that task to another security company or a series of companies, which can then employ people on a temporary or casual basis. Security checking in that regard has been absolutely useless. No-one has really vetted those people. This bill goes a very small way to do that, but that is a fundamental area where there are particular problems.

We know from the first indications that baggage handlers who should not have been working there were identified as having previous terrorist connections. We know from that that this should have been taken far more seriously than it has been. We have a situation where the security at Sydney airport in particular, although identified by Wheeler, has not been comprehensively addressed. Part of the reason is that the government just does not understand the depth of the problem at Sydney airport. The only fundamental solution to clearing out the security problems, the criminal activity that is rampant at Sydney airport and the associated potential for terrorists to operate with the people who have acted criminally at Sydney airport over decades, is to put the state police in control—not the AFP, because they do not have the resources; not the APS; not a series of different entities that have not been coordinated in the past. We need to put aside any jealousies with regard to this and say that what we need at Sydney airport and in the other major airports is state police under state control. They will take full responsibility and have the use of experienced detectives and constabulary who know what to look for in terms of identifying criminal activity and stamping it out. You still need to regulate that very heavily because the money to be made at airports throughout Australia and particularly in Sydney is simply massive.

Previously, there have been massive security holes and people could conduct criminal activities with enormous amounts of cargo going through those airports. They have had a number of different ways of going about covering up what they were doing, including making sure that extra CCTV cameras that have been provided as part of this are either turned off or not used. They have used a series of different approaches. But you need to actually take this out by root and branch. If it cannot be done effectively then you need to ensure that the steps are made here—the first two steps out of the 17—and that the mouse-like steps that have been taken are added to quickly with the further recommendations of Wheeler.

So I would suggest to the minister that he looks seriously at what Wheeler has said and at what would not be a normal response—that is, saying: maybe we should have the state police actively involved in providing security and also coordinate with Customs to ensure that we actually stamp out the criminal practices that have been involved there for decades. We need to break up the groups that have been involved in trafficking through those airports and therefore take more effective measures at stopping the confluence of crime and terrorism at those major airports. So it is not just a question of saying, ‘In the past Labor was in government and a couple of one-armed, two-armed or three-armed bandits stole gold and did all the rest of it.’ You could say that the response to that by whoever was responsible for that at the time was completely inadequate, but the world changed from September 2001. Things are dramatically different.

Sydney airport is not far from me, but I also have Bankstown Airport in my electorate. The question of what is done in relation to charter aircraft is not dealt with materially here; it is dealt with in our amendment. There is the failure to establish adequate security measures for charter flights. We have charter flights running out of Bankstown Airport and there are still inadequate controls. Further, we have had some upgrading of security at Bankstown Airport, but our amendment quite specifically says that to properly upgrade security at regional airports you have to take much greater measures.

There is still vulnerability at the major airports because there is access from those regional airports that are not, and never will be, security controlled. So I support those two elements. I have already supported the other element of our amendment here: that all baggage should be screened, and indeed all cargo, because the world is different. The thrust of the argument from the member for Blair was that you cannot really make preparation; you cannot just base it all on hindsight. The government’s job is to be foresightful, to look ahead, to plan and not merely to react, but in particular to plan more effectively because of the depth of the problem that is apparent here.

I go to the key question—and this has been looked at twice, really. There has been the Wheeler review, which was so significant, and there has also been a joint committee on aviation security in Australia. They proposed a review of this act. They also proposed changes to background checking processes of applications for aviation security identification cards, and we have got that element involved there. But I do not think there is an understanding of the complexity of this right down at the lower level, and that is: if you do not grab and take charge of something, if you allow it to be conducted by other agencies and private companies, then you are not just not taking responsibility for it, you are probably not going to fix the problems.

I do not think it is well understood that in the United States—the central capitalist country for the whole of the Western world, the one that is laid up as that—they are not as ideological as this government. They are not as hidebound by what they have convinced themselves to believe. The Americans still fundamentally understand that it is the duty of American state and federal governments to secure their citizens and to take responsibility for running the programs that will secure them and not to allow private companies that they cannot control to operate in this area. Certainly they will not be responsible for them. They can audit and benchmark what those private companies are doing as much they want, but I am not as assured when going onto Australian aircraft with the security mechanisms that we have got here, both front of house and back of house, as I am when I go to the United States. They take a hell of a lot longer to process you, but you are pretty sure now that you are going to get from one end of that process to the other, and I know there is a government willing to take charge and take responsibility, whatever its partisan stripe. That has happened in the United States. That lesson needs to be taken on board by this government.

They were very significant arguments from that Senate committee, but I want to go to another aspect that Wheeler pointed out and that aspect is very important. The review found that security infrastructure at airports was lacking. It recommended an increase in CCTV coverage of all international airports, a tightening-up of the security card system including amalgamation and streamlining of its processes, and it stated:

The present Aviation Security Identification Card (ASIC) system has a number of weaknesses, and there is confusion as to what airport access an ASIC enables.

…     …         …

Some casual or contract workers, such as security screeners and cleaners do not initially hold ASICs and may not always be accompanied on the job by an ASIC holder as required under current legislation.

Unless that is fixed, as Wheeler recommended, we remain at great risk because the casualisation of security on our airports is not something that we can afford. You cannot have people wandering in and out of the place who have not been properly vetted; it needs to be strictly controlled. But that is not the mode of operation that exists in Australia’s security controlled airports now. It is not properly addressed by this, even though there are some changes within this. I do not think the level of threat is really appreciated by the government, nor do I think they appreciate how much they actually have to do here.

To sum up, where are we with this? We have got a mouse instead of an elephant. We have got two recommendations instead of the other 15 out of Wheeler. The two recommendations do come from the joint committee report—at least the government has taken those up. But if this is the government’s first response it sure as hell better have some second, third and fourth responses pretty quickly. I would hazard a guess that it may not, because it does not take seriously enough or understand the responsibilities it has. It does not understand that governments need to grasp those problems and fundamentally say, ‘Yes, even if we have thought in the past that we should be out of this game and be simply auditing and benchmarking, we will take responsibility for what is in our charge and ensure that we do not just take the minimum number of changes and put those into effect but that we get to the very core and hub of what is the problem with aviation security and fix it and fix it now.’

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